According to economist Omar Shaban, tunnels under Gaza are believed to trade between $20 to $25 Million worth of goods a month and supply up two-thirds of all products on sale in Gaza.

Source:  Heather Sharp, “Smuggling fuels Gaza’s stalled economy,” BBC News, December 31, 2009.

Online shoppers in the United Kingdom will be spending 132 Million Pounds ($218 Million) on black market goods during the 2009 Christmas season.  The products that are to be bought were primarily stolen and counterfeit goods.

Source: “Warning over online black market,” BBC News, December 3, 2009.

Before they were officially sold in China on October 30, 2009, there were an estimated 2 million iPhones in China that were purchased on the black market.

Source:  Associated Press, “Apple’s iPhone set to make splash in South Korea,” Google News, November 27, 2009.

Prison officials around the United States are facing increased smuggling of cell phones into their prisons as inmates attempt to maintain contact with the outside world.  In the state of California, prison guards seized 2,800 cell phones in 2008, double the number from the previous year.  According to an article by the Associated Press, inmates use the smuggled cell phones to plot their escape, kill witnesses, or coordinate attacks on fellow inmates.

Prisoners with a cell phone charged other inmates up to $50 per call to use the phone.  A prison guard who was illegally selling cell phones to inmates sold each phone for $100 to $400.  He made over $100,000 selling the smuggled phones to inmates.

Source:  Don Thompson, AP, “Prisons press fight against smuggled cell phones”, Google News, April 14, 2009.

The United States shut down a financial firm in Florida that was accused of selling black market dollars to people in Venezuela. According to the Wall Street Journal, Rosemont Finance Corp. served as a major clearinghouse for the black market exchange of dollars, which are officially banned.

From the Wall Street Journal:

The black market is a crucial cog in the nation’s financial system and counts giants such as state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA among its key players. If the market remains shut down for long, it could add to problems in Venezuela’s increasingly chaotic economy. Venezuela, the fourth-largest supplier of oil to the U.S., has already been hurt by the decline in crude prices, rampant corruption and overspending on social programs.

Read the entire story here.

An organized crime group in the Korean community of Washington D.C. was involved in a wide range of illicit activities.

From the Washington Post:

The small white bungalow on Backlick Road, near a major Fairfax County intersection, seemed like an unlikely spot for a sweatshop. But when police and federal agents burst in, they found several women hunched over industrial sewing machines, cranking out counterfeit designer clothing, working off the debt they owed for passage to America.

The astonishing discovery came during a two-year investigation into a Korean organized crime ring based in Annandale that trafficked in untaxed cigarettes. Undercover officers and agents started off making $5 million in sales of contraband cigarettes. That led to the crime ring’s money laundering and numerous financial schemes. There was even a murder-for-hire plot.

A tip from an informant helped break open a criminal enterprise that stretched from Northern Virginia to New York City, according to court records in U.S. District Court in Alexandria. Seventeen people have been sent to federal prison.

Law enforcement officials around the world has dubbed an international jewel theft organization the “Pink Panthers” as they attempt to track down its members.

From the IHT:

The robbers may not have been suave celluloid jewel thieves with the charm of David Niven – a k a Sir Charles Litton, the debonair phantom bandit of the original “Pink Panther” film – but their meticulous planning, swift execution and creative style quickly raised suspicions that the Harry Winston heist was the handiwork of a loose global network of battle-hardened former soldiers and their relatives from the former Yugoslavia.

Investigators, marveling at the gang’s ingenuity, have dubbed this unlikely network the Pink Panthers. The parallels between film and reality are perhaps best summed up in the fractured accent and words of the bumbling Inspector Clouseau himself, from the original 1963 movie: “In a strange way,” he said of his nemesis, the phantom bandit, “I admire him, for he has a unique flair for the dramatic.”

The Pink Panthers – many of whose grim Interpol wanted posters show they come from the town of Nis in southern Serbia – have been roving the world’s luxury capitals since at least 2003 on reconnaissance missions for hard diamonds that can be, in the parlance of luxury security specialists, “soft targets.”

Defense lawyers for some thieves who have been arrested insist that membership in the Pink Panthers is an invention of drama-loving law enforcement authorities. But investigators say that there are about 200 members in the group, linked by village and blood, and that the Pink Panthers have scooped up jewels worth more than $130 million in bold robberies in Dubai, Switzerland, Japan, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Spain and Monaco

The United Kingdom is losing an estimated 2 Billion pounds to undeclared cash transactions. 

From the Herald:

Britain’s cash-in-hand culture now involves some two million “ghosts and moonlighters” and is losing the UK Government more than £2bn a year in lost taxes, the Commons influential Public Accounts Committee estimates today.

With a detection rate of only 1.5%, the chances of being caught are “very slight”, the cross-party committee said.

In their report, MPs noted that there were no reliable estimates on how much money was lost to the Exchequer through the “hidden economy” but suggested the worst offenders included self-employed people such as builders and decorators, “who often receive cash payments”, people who traded on the internet and buy-to-let landlords.

The Zimbabwe Army lashed out against currency brokers in an attempt to address cash shortages.

From the AFP (via Google News):

Zimbabwe’s army beat up and arrested illegal foreign currency traders in the streets of Harare on Monday, accusing them of causing the country’s severe cash shortages, police said.

Soldiers clashed with dealers after the armed forces began rounding up currency traders in the capital, an AFP journalist said.

Police were called to break up the clash, which degenerated into a looting binge in several shops, in which soldiers were accused of participating.

The Times reports on the growing demand for tickets to the inauguration of Barack Obama.

From the Times Online:

There is one booming sector of the US economy into which colossal sums of cash are still being injected: the sale of tickets and hotel rooms for Barack Obama’s inauguration.

The excitement over the January 20 swearing in of America’s first African American president is at such fever pitch that tickets for the ceremony – which are distributed for free – are already being touted on the internet for as much as $40,000 each.

Organisers of the event predict that the number of people who descend on Washington could exceed the record 1.5 million that watched the swearing in of Lyndon Johnson in 1965. The 95,000 hotel rooms in the city are already close to sold out and those looking for accommodation are being forced to search in neighbouring Virginia and Maryland.